Pen support on a Windows Phone? Microsoft experimented with it

Some months ago WindowsCentral revealed Microsoft’s original vision for what we know as their last Lumia flagships. It would have included Active Sides, Smart covers and pen support. Sadly it didn’t become a reality and Microsoft released the “boring” phones we all know. Until today nobody ever got a working prototype to show pen support in action, but we did. This post won’t focus on the prototype itself, we’ll do that in the future. Let’s just focus on the pen part for now. This particular prototype was built before the Surface team acquired the N-trig tech and started to integrate it in their products, making this one an unique piece of history. Let’s have a look at the pen in action (using a Surface Pro 4 pen):

As you’ve probably noticed the implementation is a bit rough, but it does work pretty well considering how early this prototype is. It does support multiple pens and eraser too. Our sources confirmed that this prototype includes the same N-trig technology that would later be used on Surface devices. For the curious ones, this prototype is what then became the Lumia 950XL. Apparently these features were also present on early Lumia 950 and 950 XL prototype but they were killed at later stages. We didn’t have a chance to test and confirm this yet but we’ll definitely try to. It’s kind of a shame that this never came to light, a pen paired with Lumia 950 XL big screen would have been perfect together.

What do you think about pen support on phones? Would you have liked to use a pen on your Lumia 950 (XL)? Let us know in the comments below!